Giving Thanks

First, let's get the money shot out of the way:

Isn't she a beauty?  I got a 20lb bird and it still isn't big enough!  NO BIRD WILL EVER BE BIG ENOUGH!  I obviously need a larger roasting pan.  I want one of those large, short, squarish ones.  The one I have is fine for most roasts and things, but when it comes to feeding my family, where only an 8 rib prime rib will do, and a 20lb bird is the bare minimum you would consider, I need something much, much larger.  

Thanksgiving has taken on a whole new dimension in the last five years.  As you've been hearing me trumpet for the past 8 years (!) of this little space, it was already my favorite holiday.  Then, my beautiful, dearest, sweetest BFF married the dearest, sweetest, kindest guy on Thanksgiving weekend and I will remember always being there, so incredibly happy for those two, sing-shouting Africa by Toto at the top of my lungs and the Dotytron giving his best go at dancing with all the Iranian biddies.  Then, a year later, the Big Yam was born, and every year since then his birthday has fallen around Thanksgiving and I am so thankful to have his little butt in my life.  Parenting is a weird thing.  If the mirror that being in a long-term relationship reflects back at you is one of those department store dressing room types (detailed and unflattering enough to show all the bumps and ridges in your bod, but not poorly lit enough so that you can still emerge with a small shred of self-possession and ego intact), then the self you find in the mirror of parenting is one of those illuminated, magnifying mirrors on cosmetic counters.  Every flaw, every pore, every spot, every wrinkle, every errant hair blown up and exposed with the harshest, most flattening light.  I am tested and made better by him every day, even as I enact the patented, Karl Lagerfeld School of Dog-Training/Spirit Breaking style of discipline and coercement that makes up the foundation of my parenting praxis.  

I took last Thursday off from work to take him out on a special day.  Our only goal was to take every kind of TTC imaginable and take a Go Train and end up at Dr. Rei's house to visit her and baby A.  We took the Go Train to Long Branch (which is somehow still considered part of Toronto?!  How does that work) and then promptly turned around and headed right back.  He was THRILLED:  

Just so, so, so happy, the entire time.  He was pretty sweet at Dr. Rei's house and most of the weekend.  He remembered his manners, wanted to kiss baby A a bunch of times, and was just so kind, and loving, and curious, and the perfect amount of impish, that it was truly a pleasure hanging with him.  

Last year I started the tradition of asking him 20 questions on his birthday.  Here are last year's answers:

1. What is your favorite color?  Blue like my Thomas pajamas
2. What is your favorite toy?  My double decker bus (He made me rephrase the question as: “What’s your favorite vehicle?”
3. What is your favorite thing to eat? Sausage (as he was eating sausage for breakfast)
4. What is your favorite movie? Thomas movie
5. What is your favorite outfit to wear?  Blue shoes
6. What are your favorite animals? Who’s a farmer?The animals in Farmer’s Rick barn and a rooster came and I start to cry.
7. What does Mama do for work? Hmmm...
8. What does Baba do for work? I don’t know
9. What is your favorite book?  I don’t know either.  My favorite book is...play some trains and helicopters and trains and truck
10. What is your favorite thing to do outside? Play Choo Choo
11. Who is your best friend? Mama / Tristan
12. What do you want to be when you grow up?  Here - I want to get beer
13. What's your favorite game to play?  Thomas
14. What's your favorite thing to do with Mama? Nothing.
15. What's your favorite thing to do with Baba?  Play
16. What's your favorite special treat?  chocolate
17. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?  Poh Poh (Poh Poh’s house)
18. What makes you happy?  ...
19. What makes you sad?  ...
20. What makes you scared? ...  

And this year's:

1. What is your favorite color?  Blue
2. What is your favorite toy?  The Dragons - the dragon book with the dragon pieces
3. What is your favorite thing to eat? hot dogs and macaroni and pizza
4. What is your favorite movie? The Incredibles
5. What is your favorite outfit to wear?  The cape shirt
6. What are your favorite animals? Elephants
7. What does Mama do for work? You...brush your teeth
8. What does Baba do for work? He...he...he plays music
9. What is your favorite book?  The Incredibles Book
10. What is your favorite thing to do outside? Ride my bike
11. Who is your best friend? Chloe & Indi & Meredith
12. What do you want to be when you grow up?  Ummm...a superhero
13. What's your favorite game to play?  Tag
14. What's your favorite thing to do with Mama? Go to Auntie Rei’s house on a...on a...go on a Go train
15. What's your favorite thing to do with Baba?  Have a walk
16. What's your favorite special treat?  chocolate
17. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?  To the CNE
18. What makes you happy?  When you don’t listen
19. What makes you sad?  When you say I can’t
20. What makes you scared?  Um...when it’s dark in caves.

I think some of the questions will have to change with time (like, eventually he'll figure out what I do for a living, besides brushing my teeth in preparation for work).  But he's becoming such a capable, responsible, sentient little person.  We bought a small jar of that soy-butter fake peanut butter stuff which is what he gets for school.  This morning he asked the Dotytron if he could have "some of the large parcel of peanut butter" (our regular peanut butter is in a Costco-sized jar).  I love that I co-created a 4 year old who uses the word "parcel"!  He also generally has his shiz together.  When the Dotytron was stressing about his readiness to start JK, he polled the other teachers in his school and they were like, "Does he eat his lunch? Does he bring back his lunch containers?  Yes?  He's golden!"  He puts away his dishes in the dishwasher, wipes up his place mat, is fairly responsible for feeding the cats and will get himself dressed and brush his teeth.  We are now working on bed-making and laundry sorting.

We continued the celebration on the actual day of his birthday by having dinner with Momma D, where he was thoroughly spoiled with very thoughtful, considerate, enriching gifts.  He continued to impress me by giving unprompted thank yous for every compliment, every birthday wish.  We decamped to Momma D's house all day because our basement, which was sold as "finished" but was actually a "little shop of horrors," was being demo'd and stripped down to the concrete.  

Pro tip: when you are hosting the next day and your basement doesn't have a door and is essentially open to the rest of the space, it might not be a good idea to do your demo the day before.  The "finish" was actually keeping a lock down on this unholy, dank, disgusting smell that I've only encountered in long-occupied, seldom-aired Hong Kong apartments occupied by people with questionable hygiene.  A tumid funk, if you will, that then INFECTED OUR WHOLE HOUSE.  It was kind of stressful.

We gave the place a proper cleaning and aired out the main floor and ran the exhaust and thankfully, by the time the bird was in the oven, the smell of Thanksgiving had triumphed over unwashed neglect.  IT WAS A THANKSGIVING MIRACLE!  

The visit with my sister and her family and my littlest bro was awesome.  I LOVED cooking Thanksgiving dinner in my new kitchen.  It was so effortless!  It was so painless!  It was so easy to clean up!  It made me excited for the arrival of the basement, when we'll have a whole other space where we could throw the kids down there and spread out some more.  

A shot from the Brickworks last Saturday.  We are planning on being giant nerds this weekend and going for a walk in the Don Valley and taking in the fall colours.

On our visit with Dr. Rei, we stopped by a new patisserie, The Tempered Room, in Parkdale.  I got a selection of pastries, and had a snacky, brioche type thing there.  The brioche was good, the pastries were kind of the grossest.  Clockwise from the top left we have: pumpkin tart, pomme caramel, and an eclair with nutella.  First of all: they were hella expensive, which I can accept, if the flavours are out of this world.  They were very, very small.  The nutella banana eclair was the best of the lot, but the other two were too fussy.  Each one had a flavour element that was put there I think to be progressive, but just ended up not marrying well with the overall flavour profile.  Like, the pumpkin tart had a truffled cream that was so overwhelmingly truffle (and keep in mind, I'm not a person who goes banana for truffle flavour), that it veered into a savoury dish, and one with a paste-y, almost mealy texture.  The apple thing was very pretty, but the classic combination of apple and caramel was totally thrown off by the black and white sesame seeds, which added an almost acrid, coffee-like bitterness to the dish.  I LOVE toasted sesame seed flavours, but I think that warm, roasted taste is best offset with classic, mild flavours (cream, vanilla).  The acidity of the apple didn't match well.  I wouldn't necessarily go back to that place.  

My pumpkin pie, which I've realized needs some tweaking.  It was considerably elevated by a drizzle of salted caramel sauce.

We've been eating well this week - Tuesday had my ex-bf over for dinner and had matzoh ball soup and these spinach-artichoke melts.  Wednesday we had this kale, squash, and bacon risotto.  Last night was my irie pumpkin stew with Jamaican-style rice'n'peas.

Tonight, I had the infinite wisdom to prep a pan of homemade nanaimo bars and am stupid excited for Swiss Chalet delivery.  It's the little things, folks.

Fin.

No Dog Left Behind

I'm gradually emerging from my plague ridden state.  Monday was the first day that I've actually felt well again, after a fairly intense 3 week illness.  I spent most of the week previous in a sickness induced, didn't-get-the-job-and-feeling-surprisingly-crushed-about-it mind funk, emerging from my stupor to obsessively refresh the Weather Network site and track the satellite imagery because we were hosting TWELVE (12!!!) kids for the Big Yam's dinner and a movie birthday party.

It was intense.  Some people didn't RSVP and of course I didn't chase them because quite frankly, I was hoping they forgot and I didn't want to hear "oh yes, actually we ARE coming!" I was already getting stomach knots thinking about all those f**kers in my house.  We kept it very, very simple.  We showed Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs outside on the deck on a projection screen and prefaced that with a dinner (also outside) of hot dogs and Kraft Dinner with a fruit tray and a veggie tray.  Veggie straws, a bowl of gummy bears (as a shout out to the movie), and the piece de resistance, I made these cupcakes that look like spaghetti and meatballs (round tip yellow-tinted swiss meringue buttercream with a Fererro Rocher "meatball" dipped in a strawberry sauce and plopped on top).    The weather was being a pain and it kept threatening to rain all day, interspersed with glorious moments of sunshine.  We didn't know how to call it and finally just hoped for the best.  All the parents sent their kids with winter gear and sleeping bags and in the end, the rain held off and it was a lovely (albeit a tad cold) few hours outside.  One kid plaintively asked me at one point, "When do we get to go inside?" and I was like, "You don't.  This is an outside party."  LOL!  I'm a monster.

One kid was also being a whinge and finally I just said, "Do you want to go home?" and she said yes, so I just packed her up and walked her home.  For a few seconds it looked like she was waffling but I didn't give her a chance to change her mind.  I don't have the patience for that, man (which is why I'm not a teacher).  We served popcorn and lit an inaugural fire in our outdoor fire pit (read: corner of our concrete pad that we bricked in with leftover/found bricks).  In the end, my vision of a bunch of kids all snuggled up and giggling at the antics of Flint Lockwood and co. actually measured up to the reality, but not without some fraught moments.  It looked like things were going FUBAR when the party first started and all the kids were riled up and screaming like banshees in the backyard and I was frantically blowing up balloons to keep up with demand.

The weekend prior we had both my nephews sleep over while the rest of my siblings went to the annual hospital fundraising gala my mom's organization throws.  Little Ze, the older one, balked at eating one of my test-run cupcakes because he said it "tastes like pasta" and of course, the Big Yam picked it up and refused to eat the cupcakes I made for the party.  They also got properly country mouse-city mouse'd because our charming neighbours had one of their classic blow outs that somehow seemingly inevitably ends in a quasi psychotic episode with someone screaming obscenities in the street at an ungodly hour.  The Dotytron went to the bathroom and walked by the Big Yam's room to find my two nephews, wide awake, lights on, anxious and worried and unable to sleep.  Welcome to the big city, boys!  

I met with Academic Book Club last week.  I love those women, but we have very, very different value systems and we have very, very different cultural references some times.  JJ mentioned that she was shocked about the revelation shaking up the food blogging world that the authors of the blog, "Thug Kitchen" turned out to be white.  Thug Kitchen won Saveur Magazine's best new food blog of 2013 award.  I'm not sure why.  I've linked the blog so you should read some entries.  I've read lots of pieces about the racism implicit in invoking the use of the word "thug" in the blog title and the tone of the writing (Gawker, Jezebel), but honestly, it's fascinating to me because ALL YOU HAVE TO READ IS ONE ENTRY AND YOU COULD DEDUCE THAT IT'S NOT A "THUG" (READ: BLACK) PERSON WRITING THIS VEGAN FOOD BLOG.  The whole "the authors are white!" reveal is about 15 billion degrees less surprising than the most mundane reveal on Scandal (a show the Dotytron and I both love).  Like, because the author swears (in the clunkiest, most inelegant way imaginable - you can tell it's an affectation and doesn't come from someone who drops f-bombs as part of every day speech), it's "urban"?  There's no slang, the tone is all off, and yet, the fact that people bought in says so much to me about the privileged, rarified world of food writing and foodie culture.  James Oseland as an arbiter of urban culture?  I think not.  

Anyway, those ladies are lovely but very different from I.  A few weeks ago I got to parachute in as a ringer to the Dotytron's Record Club and guys, RECORD CLUB IS SO FUN.  It's a bit of a bro-down, so I'm not sure I'd be welcome to join (they've also curated the guest list to the nth degree because the vibe is super important to them), but, as an example, the theme was jungle music and the guys came over and we played records and DJ'd and then went to a club and danced until almost 3am. By comparison, at Academic Book Club, it's shaking it up when we meet at a restaurant (this time we met at District Oven, which is a pretty terrible Middle-Eastern-ish restaurant where they don't salt the house-made pita, which is a criminal offense, in my books) instead of at someone's house where we talk about our kids and pick at a desultory spread of baby carrots and grapes and Carr's water crackers, which are my Platonian ideal of a disgusting cracker I want to get as far away from as possible.

As this post has already ventured into potpourri category, my proposed tattoo is taking shape.  A few weeks ago, while spearing the last lonely, cold, congealed hot dog off a plate, I said to the Dotytron, "No dog left behind, is what I always say," and then said, "I should get that as my tattoo!"  Imagine it, a cute, 1950s style hot dog with "No dog left behind" underneath?  That's such a good motto, isn't it?  Not only insofar as it pertains to hot dogs, but also as a motto for how you deal with friends, family, etc.?  

I'm feeling a bit low, lately.  Not getting the job, when it's an internal competition, and you've been with the organization going on eight years now, is tough, mentally.  I can tell myself that I wasn't the right fit, that it's about being the right person at the right time for the organization, and I can try to pump myself up with so many Sheryl Sandberg platitudes about how your career isn't a ladder, but a jungle gym, etc...but I still fell off the jungle gym.  On my a**, on concrete (this is an old school jungle gym - none of that recycled rubber composite padding here!  I'm having a bit of an existential crisis about it, probably exacerbated by the fact that I'm back at work after 15 months off, and this is my LIFE, ya know?  I'm (presumably) done having kids, so my career is where I'm going to be spending the majority of my time and energy and I'm feeling a bit lost and directionless.  

Other things that don't help: being sick, calorie counting so I can't even take comfort in a pile of empty carbs, getting reacquainted with rush hour TTC streetcars.  

Things that do help: visits with friends, eyelash extensions from SMckay, saying "to hell with it" and buying myself a (cheap) leather purse from ASOS anyway, fall, a long to-watch list on Netflix, slow cooker meals, moving bedtime up for all the kids so that I get an extra half hour of "me" time in front of the TV, with my knitting and quilting in hand, and more time for reading.  These guys:

REMEMBER THESE GUYS?!?  

OK.  Those nerdbombers are such giant nerdbombers.  Look at how clueless and overwhelmed by life they were.  For real. 

This guy's new catch phrase:

He's really trying to make it stick.

Dinners around here, lately:

Hit up Ja Bistro with our Guu crew.  This is the large lobster sashimi platter.  They also served this blowtorched sushi (aburi) which is nice - kind of smoky from the edges getting singed, which offsets the sweetness of the rice and the cool centre of the fish really well.  Overall, I really liked the blowtorched stuff and obviously, a pile of sashimi is always delicious, but I felt like the giant ice platter didn't showcase each piece.  We were so busy gabbing and eating that I didn't get the full 

O-TORO-gasm that you get when the pieces are presented individually, or slowly.  I might go back, but I'm more likely to hit Guu up again.

Shrimp burrito bowl times

Last night's dinner was a sausage, kale, and white bean gratin with crispy torn bread topping and baked delicata and buttercup squash.  I pre-soaked and parboiled some cannellini beans and set the aside.  In a pan, I took about a pound of sausage out of the casing, and browned it, breaking up the chunks with a spoon.  Then I added onions, garlic, a bit of the bean water, and a whole giant head of kale, thinly sliced.  Cooked that down, then stirred in the beans and seasoned with salt and pepper.  I added some apple cider and about 2 ounces of smoked gouda, diced small to the pan, then topped it with bread torn into big chunks and tossed with oil, salt and pepper.  Baked until hot.  It was good, but needed a bit more...maybe some herbs, maybe some lemon zest, maybe some parmesan?  

I have a backlog of a million book and movie reviews.  Stay tuned.

Fin.